


Silence

by SoDoRoses (FairyChess)



Category: Sanders Sides (Web Series)
Genre: Anxiety Attacks, Arguing, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Morse Code, Non-Verbal Logan, Sign Language, anxiety shuts down the logical parts of your brain, based on my own tumblr post, because i am a fundamentally self absorbed person, bye bye logan talking, selective mutism, so when virgil gets too anxious...
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-24
Updated: 2018-08-24
Packaged: 2019-07-01 23:52:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15784710
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FairyChess/pseuds/SoDoRoses
Summary: Virgil learns a new word, and in the process, steals Logan’s. Nobody has a good time.





	Silence

“Freak-out” didn’t really cover it.

Virgil was pacing the room, his arms jerking and waving, practically vibrating with tension and distress.

“He’s  _not_ going!” he said. It was clear he was trying to be firm, but his voice was shaking. Logan felt distinctly like he was being given direction from a terrified rabbit.

The argument had started with Roman and Virgil, as most of them do. A phone number from a stranger, a text requesting a date - not a new scenario, not one that they hadn’t encountered several times in the past.

But, for some reason (a build up of stress, perhaps, or another problem entirely that Virgil was avoiding by using this as an excuse - or maybe Virgil was simply tired) this time, Virgil was insistent to the point of near-hysterics that Thomas could not go.

“It’s too suspicious,” he argued, “he was broke down on the side of the road and someone just  _happens_ to see him, stop and give him his phone number? unprompted?”

Roman - who had given up on actually trying to convince Virgil to go on the date about ten minutes ago, when Virgil had surpassed “upset” and dove headlong into “perilously frantic” - was now instead trying to convince him that the man in question was not going to come to Thomas’s house and murder him in his sleep.

“You’re going to wear a hole in the floor if you don’t stop pacing, Tall Dark and Freak-out,” he said, his voice somewhere between tired and concerned.

Patton was hovering just outside Virgil’s circle of pacing, obviously trying to reconcile his desire not to crowd Virgil with his need to comfort him and ply him with baked goods and hot beverages. Patton’s hands were fisted in the hem of his shirt with the effort of not reaching out to hold and comfort and soothe.

“He could be anybody! We don’t know anything about him, what if he didn’t even give us his real name? He could turn out to be a stalker and then what if Thomas tries to give his name and it turns out nobody exists with that name???”

“Virgil,” Logan said firmly, though he couldn’t seem to raise his volume as much as he would like, “You are catastrophizing at a level that is exceptional even for you. It may be benefici-”

“I don’t know w _hat tha **t m E a N S**_ ,” Virgil snapped.

Logan’s throat spasmed painfully.

“It means,” Logan replied, a little curtly, “that you are imagining the absolute worst case scenario will happen when you have very little evidence - indeed in this case, no concrete evidence at all - that what you are worried about will come to pass.”

His voice got progressively quieter as he spoke, until the last word came out as more of a wheeze of breath than any kind of speech. Virgil, his own hand in his hair and staring into the middle distance, didn’t seem to notice, but Roman and Patton were staring at Logan with growing dismay.

“There was nobody else on the road, Logan, he was in the middle of nowhere, and he was there for hours and nobody else stopped, you can’t tell me tha **t’s no _t suspic i O U s!_** ”

Logan opened his mouth to reply, and the words simply evaporated from his mind before they got to his mouth. He worked his mouth open and shut a few times, to be sure.

He closed his eyes in resignation. This was not going to end well.

Patton flinched when he saw Logan’s fish-like gaping. Roman glared at Virgil as if on autopilot, then winced at his own reaction and focused his glare on the wall.

“ ** _Well_**?” said Virgil, turning on Logan.

Logan looked at him levelly, opening and closing his hands a few times to try and get a feel for the signs. It hadn’t happened in so long, not since before Virgil had shared his name. Logan felt foolish for not having prepared better.

A touch of his right index to his chest, a chopping motion towards his open palm, and a tap to his lips from four splayed fingers.

_I can’t speak._

Virgil’s face crumpled in horror.

He lurched towards Logan, arms jerking forward and up slightly, -  _an instinct to physically reassure,_  thought Logan - before he turned on his heel and sprinted from the room.

“Virgil, wait!” Patton pleaded, moving to follow him, “C'mon, kiddo, we can work it out-”

Logan stood from his chair and waved his hand to cut Patton off.

Patton sighed. “Are you okay?”

Logan sighed and nodded.

“I thought we were done with this,” said Roman tightly.

“He doesn’t do it on purpose, Roman,” said Patton sadly, “Not like,-”

The unfinished sentence hung heavy in the air.

Logan shook his head as if to dispel the uncomfortable atmosphere. He pointed to himself again and made a shooing motion with his index fingers.

_I’m going._

“…Are you sure you don’t want me to-?” said Patton hesitantly.

A pinching motion with his right hand.

_No._

He followed Virgil to his room, unsure of what he was really going to do once he got there. He was not very proficient in reassuring others with purely emotional problems, and that ability would suffer even more from his lack of ability to speak. But he knew Virgil, and Virgil was surely feeling incredibly guilty right now, and the only person who could successfully alleviate that would almost have to be Logan himself.

It was… distressing, to lose the ability to articulate his thoughts. The upset was mitigated slightly by way of him knowing Virgil did not do it intentionally, and was probably just as distressed, if not more, than Logan, by the fact that he had.

For Logan the experience mostly brought frustration. His thoughts maintained nearly the exact same amount of eloquence - he had simply lost the ability to translate them into speech. it was like trying to catch steam. The words simply wisped out of his reach on the way from his brain to his mouth.

He knocked on Virgil’s door, perhaps more insistently than he normally would have.

“ _ **G O A W A Y,**_ ”

He knocked out his name in Morse code on the wood of the door.

He could hear Virgil’s hiccuping with the force of his tears, which caused incredibly distressing sensations just under the center of his rib cage. he tapped out another word.

_P-L-E-A-S-E_

There was shuffling from beyond the door, and then footsteps, and then Virgil opened the door barely an inch. Only his eye and a stretch of his cheek was visible through the gap, but it was clear he had been intensely crying. His eyes were horribly bloodshot and his cheek was streaked with eyeshadow.

Logan angled himself away slightly, in the direction of his own room. He gestured backwards with both his index fingers with his eyebrows raised.

_Come here?_

Virgil hunched in on himself a bit and nodded, slipping out of his room and shutting the door. He did not make eye contact or even look at Logan at all. He focused his gaze firmly on the carpet, looking both utterly miserable and like he was bracing for a blow.

Logan restrained a sigh, and led Virgil down the hall to his own room. He opened the door and stepped back, gesturing for Virgil to enter.

Virgil hunched even further, but he entered Logan’s room without protest. He stood in the middle of the floor, curled so far into himself that he looked years younger and several inches shorter.

Logan grasped for a way to explain that Virgil was not in trouble, but their communal grasp of sign vocabulary was limited and Morse code was unwieldy. He had established their proficiency for only the most basic necessities of communication; it did not lend itself to nuance.

Logan sat down on the bed and patted the space next to him. Virgil face twitched in apprehension. Logan did it again, more insistently.

Virgil perched hesitantly on the edge of the bed, tense as a coiled spring, clearly preparing to flee at a moment’s notice. Logan sighed and waved his hand in circles, his usual gesture for “I need a moment to compose a statement.”

After a second of contemplation, Logan gestured at Virgil, brought his closed fist out from his chin, and then made a swiping gesture away from his chin a second time.

_You’re not bad._

This reassurance had the exact opposite of the intended effect. Virgil’s face twisted and his knuckles went white where they were on his knees.

“I’m  _hurt **ing y o U** ,_” he snapped, and then winced at his own distorted voice and pressed the back of his hand to his mouth.

_No_ , signed Logan, sharp and insistent, because he couldn’t say,  _you’re hurting yourself_ , or  _this is a shared experience_ , or even  _you are my friend and you would never intentionally hurt me and i_ know  _that, it is a_ universal  _constant_ -

_You’re good,_  he settled for.  _You’re_ \- he searched his vocabulary, making a frustrated noise.

_M-Y F-R-I-E-N-D_ , he spelled.

Virgil made, seemingly without his own knowledge, nearly the exact same circling gesture Logan did, though his seemed less like a request for more time to think and more like grasping desperately for the right thing to say.

“I-” he pressed the heels of his hands into his temples in frustration, “I don’t want- I don’t want to be like him,”

_You’re not,_  Logan signed, and then again, sharper, and then a third time, wishing he could explain better,  _it’s not the same, the experiences are not comparable, they are different on every quantitative and qualitative level, you are not_ doing  _this to me, this is_ happening  _to_ us-

And that was the cost, sometimes, of being parts of whole, facets of the same person - most of the time it was a feature rather than a bug, the ability to share in an experience from different angles and solve it more effectively from those positions. And then there were times like this, when the problem was not that Logan couldn’t speak, or that Virgil was upset, but both, and both were reinforcing each other, making everything so much worse.

“How can you say I’m not?” said Virgil piteously.

Logan bit the inside of his mouth in frustration.

He pointed to his own palm.

_This_.

he tapped his own mouth-

_This_ , again.

-and then the center of Virgil’s chest, just above his heart.

_T-H-E S-A-M-E T-H-I-N-G_ , he spelled slowly with the hand that wasn’t pressed to Virgil’s shirt.

Virgil’s eyes filled with tears. A noise of frustration escaped Logan’s throat, irritation that he was clearly not helping escaping his body in the only way noise still could.

“No, no,” said Virgil thickly, placing his hand over Logan’s and squeezing. “I think- I think I understand,”

Logan made a dubious expression.

Virgil snorted and gave a watery smile. “No, really,”

Logan hummed a bit doubtfully, but he nodded, taking Virgil’s word for it. Virgil hesitated for a moment, and then leaned over and placed his head on Logan’s shoulder.

“We’ve just gotta-,” he swallowed, “-get through it together,”

Logan gave a small smile, and nodded as he leaned his head on top of Virgil’s. They sat there for several moments, until their breathing matched up at a slow and sedate pace.

_There, there,_  Logan signed with distinctly sarcastic bent.

Virgil choked on a laugh, and then he was giggling, and then the giggles turned to hiccups and fresh tears spilled out, but Logan knew it was okay, because the vapor-cloud words had finally,  _finally_ crystallized at the back of his throat.

“See?” he said, happy and perhaps a bit smug, “it was hardly any trouble at all,”

**Author's Note:**

> come talk about sanders sides with me at tulipscomeinallsortsofcolors.tumblr.com


End file.
